We're all going to die. Right? We know this. But because we've had the luxury in
the West of removing, sterilizing and/or ignoring the things that cause us
discomfort and pain, we walk around pretending we're not going to die. Or worse:
we think about it and make reference to it in hushed, faux-pious tones.
Death is imminent. All the time. Everywhere. It takes so very, very little to
make it happen. Which makes it (rather automatically) unmysterious. Common,
even. And yet: when it happens to the people you care for, it never is anything
less than painful as hell itself. You get used to the process, which is sort of
helpful; but that's it. The pain is new every single time.
Death is messy. It's embarrassing, awkward, ugly. It's definitely inconvenient.
It never, ever feels right. No part of it ever feels right. And it brings out
the worst in people; those directly connected to the deceased, and those around
you with whom you might need to share the news. When my cousin died in 1992, it
was completely unexpected. It was accidental. He was 16. I went to school the
day I found out (figuring that doing something normal would be the best way for
me to cope with it during the shock stage), and I told a friend of mine what had
happened. She opened her mouth in surprise, closed it again, and walked away
from me. And then she never mentioned it afterward. A couple of years ago, the
brother of a dear friend of mine died suddenly, and although I hadn't known him,
I was stunned to receive the news at work. I got up from my desk, and the first
person I saw was an office mate I trusted. I told him what I'd just heard, and
he grimaced, chuckled a little and said, "Well, that's fun." (Amazing,
the similarities between a 15-year-old girl and a 46-year-old man, no?)
Here's what people need when someone dies:
But we aren't so small that we can't push past our silly little cubicles and
pigeonholes and scheduled me, me, me time to provide a service for a fellow
human being. Reaching out to others is risky. It's awkward. It doesn't always
feel good. And hey, guess what? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all what
it feels like to you. Because by being a willing participant in the grand, arch,
cosmic joke that is life on this planet--that is, by being willing to bare
yourself in a way that we never really do anymore in this great Western culture
of ours--you begin to see that maybe, just maybe, there's a bigger picture. And
that the bigger picture goes beyond life and death. Because once you get beyond
that, you begin to see that the little things are huge, and the big things are
tiny. And nothing is ever the same again, really, after that. And you won't
mind.
I promise.
Emma Alvarez Gibson is a writer with acute sensitivities to
branding. (As the owner of Litmus Studio, a copywriting and brand consulting boutique,
this combination comes in handy.) Her favorite words are "swoon," "madcap" and
"foxy." She loves: stories about Antarctic exploration, her trusty Canon Rebel,
red lipstick, a good gin and tonic, and graph paper. She is married to the best
man in the world. They live near the port of Los Angeles with their young son,
whose antics take years off their lives on a daily basis.
Freaky? Yeah. I know. That's a lot of death. A lot. (It may not come as a
surprise, but I spent the years between 1992 and 1998 assuming, whenever anyone
was late, that they were dead.) For a long time, I experienced this
overabundance as something shameful; a curse, if you will. Over time, I've come
to see that, for however awful these experiences have been, they've helped me to
accelerate a particular type of learning. Primarily, I've learned to live in
such a way that, if I die tomorrow, no one that I love would be left wondering
how I felt about them. But it's also given me a sort of rare privilege: the
ability to make myself useful when the people around me are faced with death.
That last one in particular gets to me. The first few days, everyone descends
upon the bereaved with cards and phone calls and meals and visits. Once the
funeral is done, people start frowning upon signs of your insistence not to get
back to life as we know it. If we're honest, we can say that other people's
grief is not terrifically exciting, and that we tend not to see beyond our own
level of entertainment. That is to say: our own level of comfort. We are small,
small creatures.
I've been thinking a lot about death lately. Yours, mine,
and the way that we relate to death in general. This is obviously one of those
topics that make a lot of people uncomfortable. (Which is to say, it's one of
those topics that tends to make people say and do really stupid things. More on
that later.) But that's never made any sense to me, probably because my
experience with death is long and deep. How long? How deep? Here's a timeline
for your reference.
© 2009 Emma Alvarez Gibson; permission to republish granted by author.
Originally published on EmmaAlvarezGibson.com.